Kolkata, Feb 13 (IANS) Enforcement Directorate (ED) sleuths probing the multi-crore teachers’ recruitment scam in West Bengal have identified a network of agents run by arrested youth Trinamool Congress leader Kuntal Ghosh for contacting candidates willing to pay money for recruitment as teachers in state-run schools.
Sources said that through interrogation of Ghosh as well as thorough examination of different documents seized from his residence, the central agency sleuths have come across names of at least 40 agents scattered over different districts of West Bengal who acted as the collection agents of Ghosh.
These agents had been mainly operating in Kolkata and its adjacent districts like North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Howrah and Hooghly, the last being the home district of Ghosh.
“Some of these agents even had sub agents. To an extent Ghosh’s operations were similar to that of chit fund entities who operate on a multi-level marketing basis. These agents will be summoned and questioned in phases in the coming days to identify those candidates who paid money for teaching jobs and the exact amount of money collected by them,” an ED associate said.
ED during course of investigation has found that Ghosh used to follow an extremely methodical pattern in running the scam.
On February 7, the central agency informed a special court of PMLA in Kolkata that Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets with special symbolic codes besides just two questions in the entire answer sheet were used in the written examination which were “the root of the entire scam” related to the recruitment process.
The ED counsel told the court that the candidates paying money for recruitment as primary teachers in the state-run schools were asked to answer only those two questions with the special codes and keep the remaining questions unanswered. The OMR sheets where only those two questions with codes were answered were indications to the main brains behind the scam that the candidates concerned had paid money and hence should be recommended for recruitment.
The ED counsel also said that Trinamool Congress legislator and the former president of West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) Manik Bhattacharya and Kuntal Ghosh were the main brains behind working out this strategy in this scam.
–IANS
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